"fakeraid"

It seems that, generally, “fakeraid” cards are not well supported, and Linux’s software raid is just as good.

Bonnie benchmarks on a Areca 11XX SATA RAID card (128MB cache) comparing a RAID10 config (4xMaxtor 300GB 7200rpm 16MB) in hardware mode versus Linux software RAID. Bandwidth tests match up with a bit more CPU usage (not surprising). Slightly larger gaps in file creation/search/deletion as those tests hit 99%+ CPU usage in every case which decrease available CPU for handling RAID requests.

                 Hardware   Software
                ---------- ----------
Seq Out Char     45M/s 91%  43M/s 91%
Seq Out Block   124M/s 41% 124M/s 49%
Seq Out Rewrite  47M/s  9%  47M/s 12%
Seq In Char      50M/s 87%  51M/s 95%
Seq In Block    118M/s 10% 121M/s 12%
Rnd Seek        .60T/s  0% .64T/s  0%
Seq Create      2.3T/s 99% 1.7T/s 99%
Seq Delete         -----      -----
Rnd Create      2.5T/s 99% 1.6T/s 99%
Rnd Delete      9.6T/s 99% 8.8T/s 99%

My experience with hardware LSI MegaRAID SCSI controllers show even better numbers using Linux software RAID. Unfortunately, all my systems using LSI controllers are in production at this time so I can’t break apart the drives to run benchmarks.